I am sure that most of you guys know what is social bookmarking (or social networking) right? I mean who doesn’t know about Digg, Stumbleupon, Friendster, Facebook and so on. These are social networking sites which people from all over the world meet, chat and exchange information. Sites like Digg and Stumbleupon provides an interface for users to come together and share interesting or useful information, news or articles about a particular topic or subject.

And now, you can create your very own Digg site! With Pligg! Basically it is a Content Management Script which allows users to “rate” or “vote” on articles which other users submit. Yes, it sounds so very familiar. Imagine having your own very cool site which everyone gathers to exchange ideas? You will certainly be the coolest kid in your kindergarten.  Na, not really. It is not just for little kids, but adults too can interact with others with the same interest. Do you like meeting others with the same hobbies as you? Well, social networking is the way to go now.

Anyways, if you are looking to create such a site, I would highly recommend you Pligg. If your webhost has PHP and MySQL support, then you can host Pligg based sites. And if your webhost doesn’t support these features, you should change to a better webhost. And I mean it. And for installing Pligg, it’s pretty easy and straightforward. All you need is a browser, FTP Client (Software) and same basic Windows and webhosting knowledge.I have written this tutorial for beginners and if you follow these steps, you should not go wrong.

Your very first step to setting up your Pligg based site is to go to Pligg’s website. From there click on Download.

Scroll down all the way and click on the Attached File. Please note that your version of Pligg might be different from the screenshot shown above. At the time of writing, the latest version of Pligg is the Beta 9.9.5. I would highly recommend you to download the latest version of Pligg as the latest version is usually the most bug free version available. Download the zip file to your computer and remember where you have stored it.

After it has finished downloading, you should extract out the files. You can use Windows (WinXP and above) own extraction software to do that. However, in this example, I am using IZArc to extract my files out. The reason why I choose to use IZArc is because I find it very stable and easy to use.

Now, remember where you have extracted the files to as you will need to modify some of the file names first.

So after you have extracted out ALL the files, you should open up the folder where the files are extracted to. There should be several folders and a whole lot of php files.

Look for a file called “settings.php.default” in the original folder. You will need to rename it to “settings.php”. So right click on the “settings.php.default” file and choose Rename.

Rename the file to “settings.php”

Your next step is to browse into the “libs” folder and look for the file “dbconnect.php.default”. Right click on the file and choose Rename.

Rename it to “dbconnect.php”.

For the next step, you will need some information from your webhost or your administrator.You will need your FTP hostname, username and password. Your webhost should be able to provide you with all these information so that you can transfer files to and from your webserver.

After you ahve connected to your FTP server, you should upload all the files inside the Pligg folder. It is important to understand that you will need to upload ALL the files and folders INSIDE the Pligg folder. Do not upload the actual folder itself as this will create a subdirectory on your webserver. But of course, if you are planning to install the Pligg script on a subdirectory then you should take note of the subdirectory.

I am using Filezilla as my FTP Client. Most FTP Clients nowadays are pretty easy to use and you should be able to follow the steps even if you are using some other FTP software. When in doubt, you should always consult your software manual. Anyways, if you are using Filezilla, you should select all the files in the extracted folder, right click and choose Upload. This will initiate the file transfer.

It will take appromximately 10-20 minutes for all the files to be uploaded. So either you go and have a smoke and come back later or you can just stare at the screen. Please ensure that all the files are uploaded to your server.

After you have successfully uploaded the files, you will need to set some permissions on several folders and files. The folders are “avatars/user_upload”, “backup”,”cache”, “languages”, “templates” and “templates_c”. You will need to give them world-writable permissions. Some call it “chmod 777″. So browse to your”avatar/user_upload” folder on your server, right click and choose File attributes. If you are using some other FTP Clients, please refer to it’s user manual for more information on how to set permissions.

Make it world-writable by enabling all Read, Write and Execute. You can also give the numeric value of 777 (that is Chmod 777).Click on OK when you are done.

Now lets do the same for the “backup” folder. Right click on the”backup” folder and choose File attributes.

Yes, do the same permissions as well. After you have finished setting the permissions, please click on OK to continue.

Yes, now we do it for the “cache” folder.

Give it world-writable permissions.  Click on OK when you are done.

Now for the “languages” folder.

Chmod 777 for that folder as well. After setting the correct permissions, click on OK.

And yes, do the exact same thing for the templates folder.

Chmod 777 yet again. Click on OK when you have finished.

Do the same for the “templates_c”  folder.

Yes, we need to Chmod 777 for that folder as well. Click on ok when you are done.

Now, let set permissions for a few files. Unlike the previous files, we are not setting them to world-writable so you will need to pay a little attention to the correct permissions for them. First, we need to change the permissions for the “settings.php” file. So find the “settings.php” file in the server (which is located at the root html directory or if you had set it, the subdirectory), right click and choose File attributes.

For this file, you will need to Chmod 666, which means no Execute permission is given. Click on Ok when you are done.

Now browse on the “dbconnect.php” file on the “libs” directory on your server. Right click on the file and choose File attributes.

Yes, set the same settings as above, ie Chmod 666.

Now lets go find the “config.php” file on the root html directory (please browse to the approriate subdirectory if you have setup your root as the subdirectory), right click and choose File attributes.

It is now time to Chmod 655. This means that only the Owner can read and write while the rest can only Excecute. Click OK when you have set the correct permissions. And finally we are almost done with setting permissions on the server.

Start your browser and point it to your website with the install folder. So if your domain name is “somebody.com”, you should browse to “http://www.somebody.com/install”. If you have setup your Pligg script on a subdirectory, then you should point to the correct URL. For example, if you have uploaded the files to a subdirectory called pligg, you should then browse to “http://www.somebody.com/plig/install”.

You will be directed to a page like the above image. Click on Next to continue.

Now it’s time to setup your database. However, first of all, you will need to create an MySQL database. If you have no idea on how to create a database, I have written a simple tutorial for you to setup a MySQL database using Cpanel or a MySQL database using DirectAdmin. After you have created your MySQL database, you will have the information to key into this page. You will need to get the Database Name, Database username, password and the hostname (called Database Server here). For Table Prefix, you can either leave it blank or just keep the defaults. This is only important if you are using multiple scripts on one database.

Ahhh….database found and everything is updated successfully. Click on Next.

So everything seems fine and dandy. The database has been updated with the necessary tables and you are about to finish the installation. But don’t go off just yet. You will need to do some “security stuff”. From the image, you can see that they are asking you to Chmod the ” libs/dbconnect.php” file back to “644″, delete off the “install” folder and change your default username and password.

So the first step we do is to change the permissions for the “dbconnect.php” in the “libs” folder. So,go back to your FTP Client and look for the file. Right click and choose File attributes.

Chmod it back to 644 as above. Click on OK when you are done.

Now, lets look for the install folder which is located at the root html directory. Right click and choose Delete.

Click Yes to delete the folder “install”. No worries, you are not going to use it anymore. Well, hopefully.

Now let’s go change your password. You will need to change your password because the default password is pretty well known. So click on “admin area”.

On the login panel, for the username type “god” and the password, you should type “12345″. This is the default username and password. You should change the password to something else to prevent unauthorised persons from accessing your Pligg control panel. You will never know what they are planning to do if you give them such access.

Now click on Profile which is located at the top menu.

Now click on Modify.

Scroll down to the bottom and you will see an option for you to change your password. So key in your old password (which is currently “12345″) and then key in your new password twice. Click on Save once you are done.

Congratulations! You have completed the installation of your very first Pligg based website. Wasn’t that easy? There is actually nothing much to learn when setting up a PHP based script.

Please note that there are a lot of features inside Pligg and you should take some time to explore all of them. You will be surprised at how powerful this script can be. I hope that this step by step tutorial is useful to you. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment here. Thank you.

If you find this tutorial useful, please donate so that I can create more of such tutorials. Through Paypal.